Monica was taken aback by this rush of words and had no idea how to reply. Sheila said, more thoughtfully: “Don’t let them coerce you into anything. Harry Greene is famous—I should say infamous—for working his junior faculty like dogs.”

Monica managed to say, with a fair degree of spirit and conviction, that she hadn’t found Glenkill at all lonely so far and she didn’t consider the work load at the school extraordinary, she liked in fact to work, she liked to feel herself strained to the limits, she was coming to believe she might be a born teacher. . . . And the Greenes and the Starkies and a number of others had been extremely helpful so far. . . . Her voice rattled on. She was slightly shaken by the woman’s frank, intimate, yet oddly negligent tone, the way she glanced at Monica, half-smiling, her sloe eyes narrowed and her heavy black brows nearly meeting at the bridge of her nose. So this was Sheila Trask? The woman about whom everyone spoke in ambiguous terms, puzzled, vaguely disapproving, clearly in awe?—yet certainly a stranger to most of them.

In the midst of Monica’s defense of her situation Sheila drifted away and went to examine her bookshelves, squatting to look at the lower shelves. She did no more than grunt a vague reply to Monica: a rude gesture in anyone else, but probably quite incidental, even innocent, in Sheila Trask. Monica’s words trailed off into silence and she thought, her cheeks burning as painfully as ever, that it was appropriate, it was the correct response, she had only been chattering away nervously and inconsequentially, she could not have said whether she meant these things or not, only that she ought to mean them. . . . Sheila ignored her for some minutes, pulling paperback books out and examining them with sudden interest. Her black hair had frizzed badly in the humid air but gave her a kind of hoydenish charm. Her thin cotton shirt was damp with perspiration and strained tight against her back, showing every bony knob of vertebrae; wisps of curly hair glistened beneath her arms. She might have been twenty years younger than her age, not a woman of distinction, surely not the widow of Morton Flaxman.

Monica, staring at her, could not decide whether she disliked Sheila Trask intensely and wished her gone, or whether she felt the tug of a powerful attraction.